The second volume of Henry Roth's long-awaited autobiographical cycle continues the saga of Ira Stigman, immigrant Jew and compulsive schlemiel. With Mercy of a Rude Stream (1994), Roth emerged from a literary hibernation of 60 years following his first novel, the 1934 classic, Call it Sleep. In his new book, he continues the story of Ira, a somewhat mopey adolescent who, at the outset of the latest work, is entering high school at the urging of his doting mother. By the time the book is over, he will have tried and abandoned a number of possible career paths, discovering at the end that he was born to be a writer. Along the way, he will engage in a lengthy incestuous affair with his sister and be drawn into a literary crowd. Roth tells this story through a multilayered narrative set in three time frames: Ira's life in the 1920s; the aging Ira's manuscript written in 1979; and the revisions to that work Ira makes in the present, often in spirited dialogue with his computer. Ira is a consummate outsider, the alienated Jew with a double burden — alienation from a Christian America and from his status as an immigrant Jew and apparent failure. Roth revisits this messy youth in densely layered and occasionally meandering prose, allowing himself indulgences like a ferocious diatribe denouncing Joyce's Leopold Bloom as a faux Jew. A Diving Rock is much more uneven than its immediate predecessor, starting slowly, almost fitfully, before bursting into full flower. It is a book of surprising moments glimpsed fleetingly — a vicious anti-Semitic outburst from baseball legend John McGraw, a near-rape in a storeroom basement, a keenly observed scene at a Greenwich Village poetry reading. Such scenes make this a book of great moments, but not quite a great book. Still, Roth is the last surviving voice of High Modernism, and even in a flawed work like this, it is a voice that should be heard.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0312140851
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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